Einstein

• A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

• A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

• Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

• As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.

• Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.

• Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.

• Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

• Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

• Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.

• Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

• The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

• Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

• Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

• Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. (In reference to Mahatma Gandhi.)

• He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

• He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

• I am not only a pacifist but a militantpacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

• I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

• I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

• I could burn my fingers that I wrote that first letter to Roosevelt. (regarding his original letter to Roosevelt about nuclear weapons)

• I don't believe in mathematics.

• I don't pretend to understand the universe — it's much bigger than I am.

• I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

• I love to travel, but hate to arrive.

• I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

• I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

• I wish they don't forget to keep those treasures pure which they have in excellence over the west: their artistic building of life, the simplicity and modesty in personal need, and the pureness and calmness of Japanese soul. (referring to the Japanese people.)

• If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

• If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.

• If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

• If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

• If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

• In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.

• Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.

• Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

• It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

• It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom.

• It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

• It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

• Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

• Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

• Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

• No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

• No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.

• Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

• No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

• Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

• One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

• One thing I have learned in a long life: All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

• One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

• Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

• Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

• Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

• Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

• Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

• Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

• Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

• The hardest thing to understand is why we can understand anything at all.

• The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

• The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.

• The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

• The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

• The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

• The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.

• Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them.

• The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

• There remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

• The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

• The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

• The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

• The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

• The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

• The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

• The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

• Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

• Truth is what stands the test of experience.

• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

• Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

• Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

• What does a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?

• Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

• You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

• You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

• We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.

• A little knowledge is dangerous. So is a lot.

• A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

• Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

• Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

• To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
  

• Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
  

• I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.
  

• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
  

• So many people today — and even professional scientists — seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
  

• For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.
  

• The position in which we are now is a very strange one which in general political life never happened. Namely, the thing that I refer to is this: To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war.
  

• Now, I believe what we should try to bring about is the general conviction that the first thing you have to abolish is war at all costs, and every other point of view must be of secondary importance.
  

• Taken on the whole, I would believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit... not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in what we believe is evil.
  

• I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.
  

• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
  

• Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements — the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.
  

• People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
  

• I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
  

• I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: “Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills” accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of freedom of will preserves me from taking too seriously myself and my fellow men as acting and deciding individuals and from losing my temper.
  

• The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.